Netflix was the most notable outage, but it wasn't the only one. Amazon's downtime affected other customers, like Salesforce.com's Heroku. And Because Heroku is itself a cloud service that hosts other company's apps, this mean that Amazon's outage affected all kinds of companies.

It did not, however, affect Amazon's own movie-streaming service that competes with Netflix, Amazon Instant Video.

On Saturday, Amazon explained that human error caused the initial problem. Someone inadvertently deleted some very important data. It promised this particular error would never happen again:

"We want to apologize. We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement in the ELB service."

Because movie-watching is a big tradition on Christmas, it was Netflix's outage that created the most fuss. Netflix fielded a long string of tweets on its customer service account, @Netflixhelps, where it noted that Amazon was to blame.

This, of course, prompted a lot of witty tweets in response like this one: